New here, had accident

[DeniseGoldberg]

Gwen -
Ow! It sounds like you have kept your sense of humor as you work to get over your awful crash.

I'm one of the other TE gals who made it through a bad crash... I also had a crash with a brain injury, but I was very lucky in that my short-term memory problems resolved themselves in what seems to be a shorter amount of time. I had no short term memory at the beginning of my recovery, and I wish I could tell you how long it took before that resolved, but I can't. I know that people who visited me in the hospital told me that I asked them the same question over and over and over again. I also know that I was very unhappy with the woman in OT (in the rehab hospital) who was trying to have me go through some standard tests. I behaved myself during our first session, but my brain doesn't work for those tests when I'm well, and the second day I just stopped participating. (Yes, you're right, I was bad!) The short term memory problem did go away though. I was out of work for probably 5 weeks, then worked from home for a couple of weeks, then split time between working at home and going in to the office for a bit.

I also had a problem with dizziness. Mine was diagnosed as post traumatic benign vertigo. I had this problem when I changed position from vertical to horizontal (or the reverse). That took quite a number of months to go away. I did go to an otolaryngologist about it, but at the time I saw him he said it was too early to treat it and that I just needed to wait. By the time he was ready to refer me to a neurologist who specialized in the condition it had started to improve and I opted to wait it out. Hmm... I just looked back through my journal, and I was reporting bad dizzy days through August, a good three months after the accident. I had been hoping to take a biking vacation in October - 5 months after my accident in May 2004. One of the docs I was seeing told me at the end of July that October was probably too soon, and he was right. I still took a vacation in October, but I did not take it with my bike.

One thing that I found helpful was to track both my dizzy days and the number of hours of sleep I was getting (another problem area at the time). I kept track of both in a spreadsheet, but a piece of paper would work just as well.

Biking? I was back on my bike 6 weeks after the accident. I waited until I was cleared by the orthopedic doc (I also had a pelvic fracture). And then it took me the rest of the year and into 2005 to work back to my normal biking shape. In the meantime, I spent quite a bit of time walking too. I was very lucky that my dizziness did not show itself when I rode, so I felt fine about getting back out on my bike.

In case you're interested, I kept a journal about my crash and recovery. It's at http://denise2004crash.crazyguyonabike.com.

Be kind to yourself as you work back to what you would consider normal.

--- Denise